User Research Report
Being thrust into a pandemic over the past two years has accelerated the already changing landscape of communication. For instance, work from home has literally removed the possibility of water cooler conversations, but they were already moving to the wayside as traditional communication shifted online. The replacement digital venues tend to have large numbers of users, making it intimidating to enter discussions and, more importantly, difficult to form personal connections with others. We see a clear gap in existing platforms for facilitating small group discussions organized around discovery – the ability for a user to find people they can talk to and get to know.
To narrow our focus, we decided to focus on the discussion of entertainment. Entertainment is a primary driver of discussion on the internet and provides clear, shared interests for people to discuss. Beyond this, the globalization of entertainment has made these discussions more popular than ever while likewise being fragmented among many sources, revealing an interest in how people find places to discuss entertainment and people to discuss with. Additionally, we decided to be primarily focused on young adults, age 18 - 24.
To answer these questions, we employed a survey comprising questions about demographics and entertainment discussion online. We sent this survey to our friends, posted it on our class discussion board, and on some subreddits (including r/udub and r/SampleSize). As such, we expect some bias in our results for those with some similarity to ourselves as well as an affinity for reddit.
Summary of Findings:
Four days after posting our survey, we received 48 responses from mostly young adults. Half identified as male, a third identified as female, and one sixth identified as other. Among the respondents were many redditors and a single extremely passionate firearms owner. Looking over the results, we learned that the most popular entertainment subjects were movies, tv shows, video games, and music. More specifically, people preferred discussing a specific work rather than a franchise or the industry as a whole. The most preferred group size was 2-5, and people who preferred smaller groups had greater diversity in their modes of communication (people who preferred larger groups communicated almost entirely asynchronously and anonymously). Also, the people who were inclined to meet new people online disproportionately favored group sizes of 5-15.
Analysis:
Looking at user responses, many of the activities in entertainment discussion have to do with communities revolving around shared interests. Users liked to see what people think about a certain piece of media by looking into communities that discuss these topics specifically. Analysis and commentary on topics in entertainment is the foundation of discussion surrounding it. Another pattern related to this is that users like to look for community content for some specific media/topic in entertainment, where specifically the goal of this activity is to find and therefore cultivate communities that engage meaningfully and add their own entertainment value to the topics they love.
The environments in which these actions take place split into two general groups. The first contains discussions with many people at once which require environments built for mass discussion. These typically have more structure in the way that users can discuss, like subreddits on reddit. The second are smaller groups which tend to use customizable discussion environments like messaging or discord groups.
The way that users interact in these communities is built around multiple forms of communication. The most popular was text and chat, meaning users typically type out messages and posts to one another. The next most significant method of communication was through the sharing of media, whether it is social media posts, videos, images, etc. These methods make sense since impersonality and anonymity is a large component of many entertainment discussions, so simple text works well for these formats. Media sharing is another example of potential community content that adds value to the discussion through introducing ideas on its own or reacting to entertainment topics.
The objects of the environments are many, and at their most basic include threads of messages between users. Groups of people of varying sizes depending on the environment are parts of these threads, where they each communicate using text, media, emojis, and other forms of reaction. And central to each community is a topic or general idea that glues it together, sometimes as literally as a question that serves as the topic for a post on a subreddit, for example. In many of these environments, they also have systems for friends to virtually represent the connections they have in real-life or have made online to create continuing discussions and interactions between members, sometimes between the specific discussion communities that are outlined in these platforms.
The users in these environments were typically younger people in the range of 18-24. These users have some personal interest in these franchises, whether it is through love or hate. The age range helped split these users descriptively, with younger people enjoying smaller groups, typically sizes of 2-5 members that are made up of people they already know in real life or online. The older users tended to be okay with larger groups typically with 50 or more members, which means that discussing with online strangers is much more common for them.
Takeaways:
The findings of our survey pointed us to two different groups of people. The first group was composed of people who preferred smaller group sizes of 2-5 and 5-15 and had diverse modes of communication. The other group preferred larger group sizes and anonymous communication. Identifying our audience is important because we want to tailor our platform to our audience’s choices. It would be difficult to cater to both groups because of their different needs. We are more interested in the first group, those who discuss entertainment with social motives. Our survey also pointed out that users want to talk about entertainment with users that they’re familiar with. For the purpose of discussing with friends, established messaging apps like WhatsApp and Messenger offer all the important features like group support, messaging styles, and media sharing that make these worthwhile to discuss on. These platforms are aligned well only for people you already know, either in person or online, and lack in creating new connections. On the other hand, platforms like Discord and Instagram do well at presenting and facilitating new connections through their own features. Learning the best practices of introducing new people to each other from these applications would be worthwhile. With what we learnt from our users, we can incorporate their choices (like group sizes, communication medium, etc) in our platform’s structure and make more informed decisions around discoverability of users on the basis of content. Equipped with the preferences of our users, we can create a platform to connect young adults through shared interests in entertainment.